Largest Credit Card Fraud Case Solved

It appears that one of the largest credit card and identity theft fraud rings in history has been officially broken up and out of business. Eleven people (so far), have been charged with the frauds which covered a number of large retail outlet stores, including the TJ Maxx family of stores, Boston Market, DSW (for shoe lovers like me), and even Forever 21, a trendy young clothing store that can be found in malls.

No explanation as to why these particular stores were chosen, but the perpetrators hacked into thousands of credit card records so that they could get customer credit information to use for themselves (which is considered identity theft), by driving around and finding open, unsecured networks and hacking into them. They supposedly would then transfer the customer’s credit information onto empty cards with new magnetic strips, and would then use those cards to make purchases on someone else’s dime.

I do remember hearing about this a few months ago, well more than that by now probably, maybe even a year ago, because I was concerned that a store I frequent, TJ Maxx was targeted, however it was unclear whether they targeted those that held store credit cards or just any general credit card, like say any generic Mastercard or Visa. They also said at that time that other stores in that family such as Marshalls were targets, but there is no mention of this in the latest information that came out.

The credit card and identity theives are charged with hijacking and selling more than 40 million credit cards and credit card numbers, which seems nearly impossible to believe, however it was apparently an international operation, so many of those could have also been used abroad which explains the number of cards that were hijacked. The thieves were from allover, including Asia, Russia, and right here in Miami (he was supposedly the ringleader and mastermind of the whole thing). Don’t these people know by now, crime never pays in the end?